Kleinkram lenkt vom Wesentlichen im Business ab

0:00From an outsider's perspective, you seem to have a really high level of focus, even going back to when you were studying for the GMAT just before I was. Do you have any suggestions or tricks for business owners that are constantly dealing with distractions on on how to maintain that focus? I think it's um learning to say no and playing out the consequences of saying no. And I'll tell you like I remember the like the very first big no when I started doing this is 12 years ago. When I had my first gym, I had a trainer call me uh at 5:00 in the morning uh to wake me out of the one night I one day I would sleep in a little bit.

0:38Um and he was like, "Dude, there's a leak." And I was like, "Okay." Uh he's like, "So, we can't have sessions." I was like, "Okay. What do you think I'm going to do?" He's like, um "Well, I just figured I'd tell you." And I was like, "Yeah, but what do you think I'm going to do?" He's like, uh "Call a plumber." I was like, "Okay. So, maybe start there." And so, a friend of mine uh he's he manages his a gazillion dollars. Um and he he told me this. He was like, "Every time he picks up the phone he says, 'Is it an emergency?'" And he said, "Because if yes, call 911. If no, why are you calling me?"

1:12And so, either way, he's like, "Don't call me." He's a good friend of mine. And I only say that because most time there's almost nothing that's urgent in a business. And that's what I've really realized. Like nothing is urgent. Like the only thing that maybe is urgent is if you have an inability to transact. So, your payment processing has just been shut down immediately and you have live transactions going. Even then, it's like there's a cost of not being able to do business and it's like, "All right, fine. We lost half a day of sales. We've done worse. We're closed 2 days a week anyways." Right? So, like we have this illusion that there's emergencies, but basically like unless bullets are flying and people are dying, I'm just not that worried. And so, because of that, um my ability to say no to more things uh has improved over time. And I think a lot of it is also communication expectation setting within the team. And this gets trained on a regular basis, which is like every single person within in this company, they say, "Hey, Alex is just not going to respond to you."

2:03And if he does just give you a thumbs up or a K, he doesn't hate you. He just says, "Got it." Like that's his way of saying, "Heard, understood." And a lot of what I focus on in training all the people who are especially in my immediate vicinity is talking about what is this going to change about what I do? And so, kind of like the AI question we had earlier, it cuts through 95% of communication is what it what do you want me to do? I just thought you should know. Well, if it's not going to change my behavior, it's irrelevant.

2:33And so, when teams, for example, present lots of data. So, in the beginning, they present no data. And then you tell them to present data. And then they just present all the data. And if they can't explain what they're going to change about the behavior if a if a if a if a a stat changes, then there's no point in reporting the stat to begin with. Cuz the only point of data is to change what you do. And so, this razor of thinking solely and exclusively about what actions I take as a result of something has eliminated the vast majority of communication in my life.

3:00It's also made me a much more proficient teacher uh for teams and for making content. So, people are like, "How do you simplify these complex things?" Because I just think about what someone has to do. And that just cuts so much out of everything. And most of the time me as a business owner, I actually don't have to do a lot. And so, most of the time it's making sure that other people aren't constrained in doing things that don't matter.

3:30So, in terms of focus, it's mostly just comes down to being able to say no. And so, Steve Jobs talks about this at length. But um I think it's the quantity and quality of things that you say no to is the measure of your focus. And so, he would start his meetings with the executives by saying, "What have you said no to lately?" And he's like some of his his exacts would say they would have to like give sacrificial lambs of like not real things they said no to. He's like, "No."

3:56Like he wouldn't be satisfied. He's like, "No, what really amazing thing that you really want to do have you said no to?" Cuz he wanted to show have people demonstrate that we're just sticking through this. Because that's where all the the big gains come on the back end. And if you think about strategy from the big picture, I know I'm ranting on this, but hopefully you guys are good with it. Um I think the reason we've been able to grow our businesses this you know, much faster than normal and grow the portfolio companies much faster than normal is because I like to think of like I think Tim Ferriss calls it the big domino, which is if I made this one thing true and only this one thing true, would it solve all of my problems?

4:36And if the answer's yes, then nothing else matters. Which means that if nothing else matters, then it doesn't deserve my attention. Not to say that it's not important little I, but if this one thing solves that or makes this other thing irrelevant, why bother? And so, that to me is where you get the highest returns on effort. And so, 4 years ago, I thought, "Hmm. If I built the biggest business brand, then I wouldn't have to worry about being the best picker for investing cuz I would have more at bats. And I wouldn't have to be the best negotiator because I would have people wanting to do deals with me. And if I am the best making business content, I'm probably pretty good at business. And so, I'll probably grow these businesses disproportionately. And so, that became the one big thing. And so, if I just do that, everything else becomes irrelevant. And so, if I didn't do that one thing, then all of these other things would be important, but not important if I make this one big thing right. And I think most businesses don't know what that one big thing is, so they do lots of small things that don't matter as much.

5:31I thought you were just going to say Ritalin. But What was that? Oh. Yeah, Ritalin. Yeah. A stimulant cycle. If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help. And if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.